In Bethlehem, I walked below Israel’s 20-foot-tall steel, wire and concrete West Bank Barrier Wall erected to help prevent terrorist attacks by Palestinians against the Israeli people. For over a half-century, the Palestinians have waged relentless wars and terrorism against Israel with the intent to “annihilate the Jews” and take over the Holy Land as a Palestinian homeland, even though they have no legal or historical right to it. The bloody assaults continue no matter how many concessions the Jewish homeland makes for peace.

Nothing less than the total destruction of the Jews will satisfy radical Islamic Jihadists. Israeli statistics indicate 3,500 Israelis have been killed and 24,000 wounded or injured as a result of Palestinian violence since Israel became a state in 1948.

U.S. President Donald Trump used the Barrier Wall as an example of how effective walls can be in protecting a nation from illegal insurgents and immigrants.

“A wall protects,” he asserted. “All you have to do is ask Israel. They were having a total disaster coming across, and (then) they had a wall. It’s 99.9 percent stoppage.”

In 1992, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin first proposed creating a physical barrier separating the Israeli and Palestinian West Bank populations. Construction began in 1994. Upon completion, the “Great Wall of Israel” will zigzag 440 miles to form a barrier against terrorism.

In 2002, the Israel Security agency reported 452 fatalities from Palestinian terrorist attacks. In 2003 with the beginning of the Second Intifada, Palestinian suicide bombings murdered 293 Israelis and injured over 1,900. Following the completion of the first segment of the wall through 2006, there were only 12 terrorist attacks that killed 64 people and injured 445. Terrorist attacks have continued to decline as the wall extends.

Although the Palestinian Liberation organizations renounced terrorism in 1988 and Fatah says it no longer engages in terrorist acts, both organizations are lying. The Palestinian organizations pay seven percent of their overall national budgets to incentivize terrorism by awarding large “martyr’s” stipends to families of Palestinians killed or arrested while committing terrorism against Jews. The U.S. inadvertently contributes to the Martyr’s Fund through its Foreign Aid to Palestine.

Predictably, the International Court of Justice ruled the Barrier Wall to be a violation of international law. The UN General Assembly condemned the barrier by a vote of 150-6, with 10 abstentions.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel has committed a single act of terrorism against Islamic fanatics. They have only attempted to defend their citizens. Yet, the UN’s next step will be to condemn Trump’s wall as a violation of international law and human rights.

I stood below Israel’s Great Wall in Jerusalem and pumped my fist in its honor.

The Department of Homeland Security recently recommended that citizens be required to possess a National Identity Card. States that refuse to comply with “Real ID” will soon discover their residents cannot travel interstate or internationally on airliners and trains. This is how totalitarian states operate. Remember the chilling phrase “Your papers please” from the days of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia? From Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance for America to Remain Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser. To be released in September in hardcover, but can be pre-ordered through Barnes & Noble or Amazon. If you can’t wait, you can buy the ebook right now to read on the Amazon Kindle or Kindle app.

Wild animals were a part of my growing up in the hills along the Oklahoma-Arkansas border. Half-wild myself, I often roamed the wilderness not only with a dog but also with perhaps a pet raccoon or skunk trailing after me or a crow or hawk raised from hatchlings flying overhead and returning occasionally to settle on my shoulder. I was more at home in the woods with my animals, who all got along together with little squabbling, than I would ever be at any cocktail party or other formal event. People thought me a strange kid that way.

Even today on the ranch, critters from the wild visit the house. A squirrel named Calvin lived in the pecan trees out front for about five years and would chatter greetings every morning and bring in his wives to show off a new brood. Within the past weeks, my son brought me a baby raccoon and Donna Sue found an injured sparrow nestling.

The only species of animal or fowl I detest are mice and rats. That’s a fairly recent development that began when I was a homicide detective with the Tulsa Police Department.

One hot July afternoon I was summoned to a murder that occurred in the basement of a rundown brick apartment building without central air and heating. The nauseating stench of decaying flesh permeated the entire basement, filtering up the filthy staircase as I approached the door at the bottom. The guy had been dead two days in sweltering summer heat in an enclosed room.

He was a man in his late forties and weighed nearly 300 pounds. Bloat made him appear even larger. Naked, he had been strangled in bed and lay on his back staring with empty eye sockets at the ceiling. His eyes had been gnawed from his skull.

The mouth gaped wide. As I approached to begin my investigation, I startled when a mouse suddenly darted from the corpse’s open mouth and scurried away. I had to leave the room temporarily to recover.

Since then, anytime I see a mouse or rat, no matter the circumstances, the first image that comes to mind is that of the mouse emerging from the dead man’s mouth.

“We are witnessing what can only be the cultural, political, and economic decline of the United States and the fall of Western Civilization.” From Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser is now available for pre-ordering through the Internet.

And few people. Canoeing alone across Canada’s vast and nearly-empty Yukon Territory, I encountered no other human beings for days at a time. A canoe on a wild river offers an excellent platform from which to view the world. I wanted the journey to go on and on, forever. It was a simple and satisfying existence. I lived for what the moment brought. Tomorrows do not exist in the wilderness. You eat, you sleep, you travel.

I spotted abandoned Fort Selkirk high on a flat bluff overlooking the junction where the Pelly River Joins the Yukon River. It was one of the most remarkable of all ghost towns and deserted settlements documenting man’s unsuccessful efforts to tame the wilderness. Viewed from upriver, it was a scene as placid and picturesque as a New England post card.

After beaching my canoe, I climbed the high bank and, somewhat awed, strolled through the town in eerie silence. Being alone in the wilderness is different from being alone where man has lived and worked and built on his dreams for a century, only to surrender it all in the end. There was something disquieting about it. I felt like an intruder prowling where people had just stepped out for a decade or so and would be returning shortly.

First occupied in 1848 as a trading post for the Hudson Bay Company, Fort Selkirk had been used by miners, trappers, steam boaters, soldiers, and traders until the last family departed in 1951. About 30 buildings remained—a church, a Hudson Bay store, a one-room log schoolhouse still furnished with hand-hewn desks and a blackboard made from a stretched moose hide, a livery, some houses. . . The houses looked as though the occupants had just departed, leaving behind furniture and tools from the turn of the century.

So attuned had I become to being alone that a wisp of smoke trailing upward from one of the outer cabins gave me a momentary start. I soon discovered that the town wasn’t quite consigned to ghosts. Danny Roberts was still there. He was a little old man with an Indian face and a pair of high rubber boots.

“I’m the last one,” he explained. “I was born and raised here. My wife died three years ago, and all the others left long ago. I’m the last one.”

He wasn’t waiting for the others to return; he knew they never would. I wondered how it felt to be the last living resident of a town.

COMING SOON: Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing, by Charles W. Sasser. “Socialist body snatchers are bent on moving toward a highly regulated one-world socialist government of limited individual freedom. Can they be stopped before America is engulfed in tyranny?”

After a year, 16 of the 65 who survived Army Special Forces Medic training, one of the most demanding courses in the military, made it to the last day and the last test. Pass or fail, a student received five minutes and two attempts to open a patent intravenous line on another student. Failure meant he was out of the course on its last day.

I was class leader. One of my soldiers was so muscle-bound that no one had been able to find a vein in that mass in order to start an IV. Predictably, the two students who drew him as a patient failed the test—and the course.

I looked at their anguished faces. I turned and walked away. The standards were set.

“If you are wounded in battle,” went the rationale, “would you want second best working on you?”

Next morning at graduation formation, an instructor marched out. “Sergeant Sasser, have all your men line up at the OR. Everyone retests on the IV.”

I hurried to the Lab Officer-in-Charge, a captain.

“Retest the two who failed,” I offered. “They didn’t have a fair chance with the patient they drew. The others have already passed. It’s unfair to put them through it again.”

“Everyone retests,” he insisted.

Whenever there is a difference between an enlisted man and an officer, the officer is always right.

I came out of the OR. Every student eye focused on me.

“Sergeant Sasser, this is wrong,” my assistant protested angrily. “You have to do something.”

Obviously something desperate. Which would likely end my military career.

“Sergeant Mansell,” I ordered, “have the men form up in the street.”

I drew a deep breath and returned to the OR. “Captain, with any due respect, my men refuse to retest.”

“I’ll have you court martialed for disobeying a direct order. I’ll send you to Leavenworth.”

News of the revolt flashed all over Fort Bragg. I explained the situation to my soldiers, including possible consequences.

“But we must never compromise with injustice,” I stressed. “Each time we do, it becomes easier to compromise the next time. Soon, even the concept of right and wrong disappears.”

For hours in the North Carolina sun my Green Beret soldiers stood unmoving at parade rest, with myself positioned out front, resisting all threats to have us court martialed. Not a soldier moved.

High-ranking officers appeared. They seemed stunned that young enlisted men led by a grizzled sergeant dared question the authority of an officer because of principle.

The captain folded first. He came outside about noon. “Sergeant Sasser, have your men back here at 1300 hours. Everyone graduates.”

This incident during which a class of enlisted students took on the entire leadership of Fort Bragg is still remembered and talked about years later as “The Goat Lab Revolt.” Now retired from the military, I still receive mail from my students who were there that day, and from other Green Berets who have heard the story.

One of the more recent came from student John Cain, who is now a minister.

“You affected a lot of lives that day,” he wrote, “when you inspired us to stand up to the brass. That was a classic 24 hours. I still respect you for that to this day.”

I replied, “I was so proud of you guys who had the guts to stand up for what was right. You guys were the real stars, and I’ll never forget that there are Americans who still believe in doing what is right, even when it’s not always convenient.”

Marine BLT 2/3 was in the middle of a firefight its second day in-country in Vietnam when the unit was jerked out and sent to a place called Khe Sanh—which became the most savage fight of the Vietnam War. Blood In The Hillsby Robert Maras and Charles W. Sasser is Maras’ personal account of that fight. It is available at most book stores and on-line.

Remember the snowflakes of Occupy Wall Street who were melting down over the 1%? Going undercover as a journalist to investigate OWS in New York provided me a great deal of insight into Rome’s final days when the music died. Rome was so distracted by cultural garbage that the people failed to notice that their rights and liberties were being dismantled.

Look at today’s America: looting, shooting, arson, throwing rocks at cops, rioting, protesting and “safe places” on college campuses to suppress the free speech of anyone with whom the petunias and academic staff disagree, more and more people, especially the young, demanding socialism and communism… Think Bernie Sanders.

What destroyed Rome, and has likewise destroyed other nations and empires, was moral and social decadence, weariness, suspicion, laziness, preoccupation with self, corruption, hedonism, materialism, rejection of truth and common sense…

Historian Jim Nelson Black listed symptoms that indicate a modern dying society: an over-centralized government; heavy taxation; top-heavy bureaucracies; liberal policies controlled by sentiment rather than sound judgment; general increase in lawlessness; loss of economic discipline and self-restraint; excessive government regulations; dying religion; erosion of quality and relevancy of education; immorality; decline in the value of human life…

I witnessed these symptoms on OWS. We witness them in society at large.

Author/historian David Kupelian said it best: “Our world includes entire nations that resemble insane asylums with the most deluded and dangerous people in positions of authority. In the case of major utopian systems… millions are brainwashed into not only embracing impossibly irrational, degrading and destructive beliefs (such as socialism), but also believing that they are required to force everyone else on earth to adopt their beliefs—or else be subjugated and slaughtered.”

COMING SOON. Watch for it via a major media blitz in September. Crushing The Collective, by Charles W. Sasser, who writes, “It may be too late to save a free United States of America, as it was too late to save Rome or any of the other empires that collapsed. . . The torch is burning out in America.”